Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T05:17:58.963Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Divine knowledge as direct awareness: a defence of Alston

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

MOHAMMAD SAEEDIMEHR*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Tarbiat Modares University (TMU), Jalale Ale Ahmad Highway, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

In his ‘Does God have beliefs?’, William Alston argues for an intuitive construal of the nature of Divine knowledge according to which God's knowledge consists in His direct awareness without any beliefs. Recently, Travis Dickinson has raised some objections to Alston's view and has developed an alternative account of God's knowledge as His acquaintance with a fact, a corresponding thought or belief, and a correspondence between these two. In this article, I respond to Dickinson's objections and show that there is no reason to favour his acquaintance construal of God's knowledge over Alston's intuitive view of the nature of God's knowledge.

Type
Original Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alston, William (1986) ‘Does God have beliefs?’, Religious Studies, 22, 287306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alston, William (1989) Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alston, William (1993) ‘Infallibility’, in Dancy, Jonathan & Sosa, Ernest (eds) A Companion to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell), 206.Google Scholar
Dickinson, Travis M. (2019) ‘God knows: acquaintance and the nature of divine knowledge’, Religious Studies, 55, 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hasan, Ali & Fumerton, Richard (2014) ‘Knowledge by acquaintance vs. description’, in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/knowledge-aquaindescrip/>.Google Scholar
Hasker, William (1988) ‘Yes, God has beliefs!’, Religious Studies, 24, 385394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Glen (2011) ‘Two kinds of a priori infallibility’, Synthese, 181, 241253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mulligan, Kevin & Correia, Fabrice (2017) ‘Facts’, in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/facts/>.Google Scholar
Murray, Michael J. & Rea, Michael C. (2008) An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taliaferro, Charles (2018) ‘Philosophy of religion’, in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/philosophy-religion/>.Google Scholar
Wainwright, W. J. (ed.) (2005) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar